Been meaning to do some Googling/research, but has anyone here tried out the Raspberry Pi yet? I'm really wanting to migrate my current HTPC setup to something that's not a huge glowing desktop tower sitting next to my TV. Not sure if it would handle my 1080p video and gaming emulation needs though.

Been meaning to do some Googling/research, but has anyone here tried out the Raspberry Pi yet? I'm really wanting to migrate my current HTPC setup to something that's not a huge glowing desktop tower sitting next to my TV. Not sure if it would handle my 1080p video and gaming emulation needs though.

Should handle the 1080p video just fine. Game emulation depends on what you're looking to emulate.

I need to purchase a new computer in the near future. I work in a hospital which has computer access all over the place plus I have my android. I rarely travel and when i do i dont bring worj. So I'm thinking a laptop would be worthless.

Not a Mac fanboy in the least.

I need a machine with processing power.

Not looking to build a machine. Budget is one thousand or so. Recommendations?

I need to purchase a new computer in the near future. I work in a hospital which has computer access all over the place plus I have my android. I rarely travel and when i do i dont bring worj. So I'm thinking a laptop would be worthless.

Not a Mac fanboy in the least.

I need a machine with processing power.

Not looking to build a machine. Budget is one thousand or so. Recommendations?

The following is a list of mostly generic questions to get a baseline of what you're looking for in a computer.

Do you plan to use this computer for gaming and if so what does your games library look like, or what do you want it to look like?

Do you use CAD programs or Video editing software?

How much hard drive space does you current PC have and how full is it?

Are you willing to sacrifice mass storage for your PC performing better overall? (The Hard Drive vs SSD question, you can get both but on a budget it's hard to fit both in.)

Do you already have a monitor or other peripherals and are you happy with them?

Been meaning to do some Googling/research, but has anyone here tried out the Raspberry Pi yet? I'm really wanting to migrate my current HTPC setup to something that's not a huge glowing desktop tower sitting next to my TV. Not sure if it would handle my 1080p video and gaming emulation needs though.

Look into the Intel NUC units, we sell them at work. They have Intel HD Graphics which can play even 4K video flawlessly

i just use one of them WDTV Live boxes, it was fairly cheap and it just works. plays the 20gb+ 3d rip of avatar i have no problemo, all big file size native 1080p stuff. the apps are alright (youtube, netflix, spotify etc.) but i only really use youtube and play videos via my phone. not too bothered about 4k myself as i don't plan on getting a new tv for at least a year or two.

What's a good website for a custom built gaming PC? I know I could save money building it myself but I don't want to.

maingear and ibuypowet are okay. There really aren't any that I would say are good. If you can find someone you know that would build it for you you'd be better off buy I understand not everyone wants to do that.

Been meaning to do some Googling/research, but has anyone here tried out the Raspberry Pi yet? I'm really wanting to migrate my current HTPC setup to something that's not a huge glowing desktop tower sitting next to my TV. Not sure if it would handle my 1080p video and gaming emulation needs though.

I have a raspberry pi and dont really recommend it if youre trying to use it for XBMC. Theres just not enough memory for the ui to run smoothly (512 mb). Now if youre just gonna run ubuntu or linux and hook a hard drive with movies on it, from what I hear that works well. Im currently looking in to streaming content from my pc on the pi in another room via ethernet bc I was unsatisfied with using the XBMC os on it. The 100 mb/s ethernet port also can keep you from streaming large files to well, no gigabit support. As for emulation, I wouldnt expect much more than nes or snes, maybe ps1.

So basically for my job I'm more or less a rack monkey. Though I do spend a decent amount of time in various *nix distro'd servers fixing apache/nginx when clients break shit, I'd say the majority of my time is spent in the datacenter building web servers, running cables, racking and installing, etc. Even though I've been doing this for quite a while, I oddly just became very interested in building a PC for myself about two weeks ago. Then I thought to myself why I haven't done this already, considering all I have is an old desktop I built back in high school (before SATA cables were available and cases had better cable management, so there's just big fat gray ribbon cables everywhere) and a really shitty Dell laptop that just hit the 6 year old mark.

I didn't really need to do much research considering in my job I have to keep up to date, however graphic cards and GPUs I was completely behind on because obviously you don't install those in web servers. Anyway, so throughout the past two weeks I compiled all the parts I wanted, bought them, and just finished building it out last Friday. And I wanted to share my creation with you all, because I think it came out great for a nice budgeted build! Especially since I hadn't done this in over 10 years.

Power Supply: NZXT HALE82 V2 550W
This is a completely white power supply, with a sexy finish and incredibly quiet. It matched perfectly with my black/white case above.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H ATX LGA1150
An absolutely gorgeous motherboard at an extremely reasonable price considering the features/slots/expansions included. And though I'm not a fan, it has both types of NICs - the old, reliable Intel, and the newer "Killer".

Video Card: EVGA SuperClocked GeForce GTX 760 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 SLI Support w/ EVGA ACX Cooler
I'm a casual PC gamer, so I definitely didn't need anything hardcore. However I was still hesitant about grabbing this one and hoping it would at least be good enough to run my games in 1080p with a dual-monitor setup. Luckily this thing can handle that without breaking a sweat. I still don't feel like I fully understand the ins and outs of GPUs yet, but I'm still super satisfied with this purchase.

Storage: SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE250BW 250GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD
Well it's 2014, so I obviously wanted to install an SSD. It was basically between this and a similarly sized Crucial (256GB), but this one was on sale at the time and $45 cheaper so I went with it. Plus I've never had issues with Samsung, and so far it's proving to be great.

Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Honestly, memory is memory - despite what many will argue. So in deciding this, I went with a brand I was familiar with, that wasn't incredibly expensive, and that was a "low-profile" (so I could later replace my stock CPU fan with an actual third party CPU cooler; the cooler I want needs a lot of room). I'm thinking 16GB was probably a bit of overkill, but I just thought fuck it.

So basically for my job I'm more or less a rack monkey. Though I do spend a decent amount of time in various *nix distro'd servers fixing apache/nginx when clients break shit, I'd say the majority of my time is spent in the datacenter building web servers, running cables, racking and installing, etc. Even though I've been doing this for quite a while, I oddly just became very interested in building a PC for myself about two weeks ago. Then I thought to myself why I haven't done this already, considering all I have is an old desktop I built back in high school (before SATA cables were available and cases had better cable management, so there's just big fat gray ribbon cables everywhere) and a really shitty Dell laptop that just hit the 6 year old mark.

I didn't really need to do much research considering in my job I have to keep up to date, however graphic cards and GPUs I was completely behind on because obviously you don't install those in web servers. Anyway, so throughout the past two weeks I compiled all the parts I wanted, bought them, and just finished building it out last Friday. And I wanted to share my creation with you all, because I think it came out great for a nice budgeted build! Especially since I hadn't done this in over 10 years.

Power Supply: NZXT HALE82 V2 550W
This is a completely white power supply, with a sexy finish and incredibly quiet. It matched perfectly with my black/white case above.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H ATX LGA1150
An absolutely gorgeous motherboard at an extremely reasonable price considering the features/slots/expansions included. And though I'm not a fan, it has both types of NICs - the old, reliable Intel, and the newer "Killer".

Video Card: EVGA SuperClocked GeForce GTX 760 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 SLI Support w/ EVGA ACX Cooler
I'm a casual PC gamer, so I definitely didn't need anything hardcore. However I was still hesitant about grabbing this one and hoping it would at least be good enough to run my games in 1080p with a dual-monitor setup. Luckily this thing can handle that without breaking a sweat. I still don't feel like I fully understand the ins and outs of GPUs yet, but I'm still super satisfied with this purchase.

Storage: SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE250BW 250GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD
Well it's 2014, so I obviously wanted to install an SSD. It was basically between this and a similarly sized Crucial (256GB), but this one was on sale at the time and $45 cheaper so I went with it. Plus I've never had issues with Samsung, and so far it's proving to be great.

Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
Honestly, memory is memory - despite what many will argue. So in deciding this, I went with a brand I was familiar with, that wasn't incredibly expensive, and that was a "low-profile" (so I could later replace my stock CPU fan with an actual third party CPU cooler; the cooler I want needs a lot of room). I'm thinking 16GB was probably a bit of overkill, but I just thought fuck it.

Everything you've gotten so far looks really amazing, I did a build in the Define R4 and while it doesn't have enough radiator space for me it is an absolutely beautiful case.

Edit: There doesn't appear to be a picture of the finished build in that album so I'm not sure if you did this already, but as long as you are only using 1-3 hard drive bays (you techincally don't have to use any since there are SSD mounting points on the back of the motherboard tray) I would pull out that middle hard drive cage so the front fans have a clear path to blow air over the graphics cards. Hard drive cages are very restrictive so if you aren't using them and they can be easily removed, as the ones in the Define R4 can, I would pull them out.

Everything you've gotten so far looks really amazing, I did a build in the Define R4 and while it doesn't have enough radiator space for me it is an absolutely beautiful case.

Edit: There doesn't appear to be a picture of the finished build in that album so I'm not sure if you did this already, but as long as you are only using 1-3 hard drive bays (you techincally don't have to use any since there are SSD mounting points on the back of the motherboard tray) I would pull out that middle hard drive cage so the front fans have a clear path to blow air over the graphics cards. Hard drive cages are very restrictive so if you aren't using them and they can be easily removed, as the ones in the Define R4 can, I would pull them out.

Yes, that was another thing I was completely surprised about. I mean, it may be standard these days, but I read in the manual you could mount the SSDs on the back of the motherboard tray in the R4. I thought that was incredibly bad ass. I still just kept it in the top five-bay cage, but I honestly might plan on mounting it in the back.

Also, you don't have enough room in it even when you completely take out that top five-bay cage?

And I'll add some more pictures of the actual finished product in a minute. I had to take it home to finish working on it and the lighting wasn't the best here so I couldn't get as good pictures as I could at my office.

Yes, that was another thing I was completely surprised about. I mean, it may be standard these days, but I read in the manual you could mount the SSDs on the back of the motherboard tray in the R4. I thought that was incredibly bad ass. I still just kept it in the top five-bay cage, but I honestly might plan on mounting it in the back.

Also, you don't have enough room in it even when you completely take out that top five-bay cage?

And I'll add some more pictures of the actual finished product in a minute. I had to take it home to finish working on it and the lighting wasn't the best here so I couldn't get as good pictures as I could at my office.

I have 2 360mm radiators in my build, the top of the R4 only holds a 240mm radiator and the front can only house a 240mm rad if you remove the 5 1/4 bays since the end tanks of a radiator extend higher than the top of the last fan. I have my build in an NZXT h440 and even that isn't *really* big enough. The front radiator isn't mounted properly because if it is the end cap on the front rad hits the last fan on the top rad, and the pump/res combo is more or less floating because there isn't enough room to mount it between the front radiator and the graphics cards.